Year 3 PhD – February 2011

As Year 3 begins, a short reflection on: MY SECOND YEAR EXPERIENCE

The big difference for me in the second year was the level of intensity. In the first year there was so much to take in, so much to think about it was absolutely overwhelming. I went to every seminar, talk, course the uni offered. And I think in the first year this is a good approach, it hooks you into the community, you are exposed to a wide range of ways of thinking.

The second year was a bit calmer for three reasons.

Firstly, a year along the path things were now a bit clearer, the path was less murky and I became more selective in what I attended as I had enough knowledge to make an informed decision as to whether it would be useful to me or not. I knew what I needed to focus on for the first 6 months, I needed to prepare for my doctoral assessment and submit my ethics application. Things had started to come together with greater clarity. I was starting to find my own way and had a better balance in life with a slightly reduced workload in my business.

Secondly, I began to deliberately relax my personal standards. Although it feels uncomfortable for me not to do something to the best of my ability and beyond, I accepted that if I try and do this PhD to a standard to which I feel totally happy with, I’d have to kill myself with the amount of work needed – maybe if I was doing it fulltime I could do that but not while I am working. So I am having to hand in work that is a standard that normally I would think is not good enough, but in the end it turns out to be acceptable and I am just trying to not cringe about it. Perhaps it is more my perception, if I did it as thoroughly as I would like, I might feel better, but perhaps the standard wouldn’t be that much higher anyway.

Thirdly, my ‘writing’ group has been a breath of sanity in a sometimes insane space. Throughout the first year we were put into groups in our cohort, did activities together, but you naturally gravitate towards like-minded people. At the FASS conference there was an inspiring presentation from a group of doctoral students who had set up a very successful writing group. The plan was that in our second year this process would be facilitated by UTS and although they did attempt this I would not say it was particularly successful – at least from my perspective. Myself and two other women from my cohort decided to do a fortnightly skype call. This really was a lifeline throughout the second year – particularly as the umbilical cord had been severed and we were no longer in the first year supported program. Every fortnight we’d chat for around an hour or so, where were we all up to, had anyone read anything interesting or found good resources or heard about good seminars or conferences. We had a space where we could discuss our fears, our weaknesses and our insecurities. We had a forum where we could raise methodological issues we were grappling with, concerns about our own research questions or bounce ideas around. We gave each other feedback on our doctoral assessment presentations, our ethics applications and anything else we did along the way like poster presentations or conference abstracts and papers. We kept each other motivated and most importantly kept the momentum going. It is very easy, particularly when you are part-time, to just let things slide. But when you are having regular updates on a fortnightly basis it is just that little bit of added impetus that is sometimes needed to get you over the line.

Now as the third year begins, I am on leave for a semester while my mum has chemo and then will plunge into data gathering in Semester 2. Hold on tight, here goes the rollercoaster again!